Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

Half Sigma doesn’t realize that there are people in the world who can’t bear to throw anything away. Typically these people wind up with 400 cats and a house full of stacked old newspapers and magazines. But add a Ph.D. and you get the dying-language hand-wringers.

Don’t get me started on the gadgetry of cooking. I could spend hours learning about the best types of bottle openers, the best sauté pans, and the difference between convection and regular microwaving. When we were shopping for a refrigerator for our new home, I totally geeked out learning about how some fridges circulate air between the freezer and the regular fridge, which is apparently suboptimal for freshness. If you’ve read this far, you know what I’m talking about. Cooking tools are way cooler than the food itself.

First, the meritocracy is based on an overly narrow definition of talent. Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. It is not related at all to skills like empathy. Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.

We’ve heard how it takes 60 votes to get anything done in the Senate. But prior to Scott Brown, Obama had 60 votes. He couldn’t forge a consensus within his own party because he never convinced his base to settle for anything less than the outer edge of the possible. And here the example of Evan Bayh is telling.

I said “Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.” And I pointed at a cause: “We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped.”

The consent of the governed, it is worth remembering, is the only just source of the power that government wields in a free society. One cannot consent to what one cannot know. Thus, there can be no legitimate government if, as Madison put it in Federalist No. 62, “the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

Maybe that’s the Obama administration’s problem with Arizona’s new law: It is too short (16 pages), too clear, and too reflective of the popular will. Unlike the social scientists in Nancy Pelosi’s federal laboratory, state lawmakers didn’t need to pass the law first in order to find out what was in it. Essentially, it criminalizes (as a state misdemeanor) something that is already illegal (namely, being present in the United States in violation of federal law), and it directs law-enforcement officers to, yes, enforce the law. Democrats and their media echo-chamber regard this as radical; for most of us, it is what’s known as common sense.

And here’s another commonsense proposition: A government that abdicates our national defense against outside forces is no longer a government worth having.

Shining a little reality on the make-believe world of the lily-white Crusitian Narrative.

To the people out there, apparently they see these tiny minorities and think of police singling them out as illegal aliens, because in the greater beltway area that group stands out as a foreign element. Not so here in California and Arizona.

You really think that police would or could see a full quarter-to-third of the population and honestly think that just looking like them would cause a reasonable suspicion of illegal immigration status? Do you east coasters think that we, living in states where government-defined “minorities” are the majority (or quickly becoming so) of the population, stare at everyone who looks “hispanic” and suspect something?

Seriously. If the Arizona cops thought they had to stop one out of four people, the law would stop being enforced in a week. Just think, people, before you accuse.

A society is formed by the voluntary bonding of individuals into overlapping, ever-changing groups whose members strive to serve each others’ emotional and material needs. Government — regardless of its rhetoric — is an outside force that cannot possibly replicate societal bonding, or even foster it. At best, government can help preserve society — as it does when it deters aggression from abroad or administers justice. But in the main, government corrodes society by destroying bonds between individuals and dictating the terms of social and economic intercourse — as it does through countless laws, regulations, and programs, from Social Security to farm subsidies, from corporate welfare to the hapless “war” on drugs, from the minimum wage to affirmative action. On balance, the greatest threat to society is government itself.

As San Francisco and other “sanctuary cities” declare war on Arizona over its new law cracking down on illegal immigrants, most state and local governments that provide a safe haven to undocumented workers refused to publicly roll out a welcome mat for the estimated 440,000 illegals in the Grand Canyon state.

‘Progressives’ always talk a good fight, but it’s always just talk. They never put their money where their mouth is, because, well, it’s money. ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’

Mayor Gavin Newsom this week suspended all non-essential travel for city employees going to Arizona, meaning no conference in Scottsdale next weekend for members of the city’s housing authorities. The city’s Board of Supervisors also has taken the first step toward an economic boycott, a move that could result in the suspension of existing contracts with Arizona-based companies and a ban on new ones.

San Fransisco won’t do business with us. Oh, don’t throw us in that briar patch.

The problem with boycotts is that they never succeed unless enforced by law, and often not even then. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

Apple recently delayed the iPad’s international launch after huge demand in the United States caught the maker of trendy iPhones and MacBooks off guard. But Chinese consumers looking for knock-offs of the company’s latest must-have product need look no further than this teeming electronics mall in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese boomtown near the border with Hong Kong.

Hefty and thickset with three USB ports and a more rectangular shape than the original, this knock-off with iPad aspirations, which runs a Windows operating system, looks more like a giant iPhone. It costs 2,800 yuan ($410), making it slightly cheaper than the iPad’s $499-$699 price tag.

In theory, the whole point of ‘intellectual property’ laws was to foster innovation, the underlying premise being that people wouldn’t innovate without a law-guaranteed return on their investment. As with many fine-sounding theories, that would appear not to reflect what happens in the real world. It would seem time to rethink the whole issue … but, of course, that’s not going to happen.

In response, British officials quickly apologized, and announced that the responsible party had been verbally reprimanded, and shifted to other duties. Note that he wasn’t fired, he isn’t living in hiding under 24-hour guard, and that the streets did not fill with crowds of ranting Irish and Polish youths demanding his death. There hasn’t been an international campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at Englishmen. The bigoted bureaucrat was simply shifted to another job. Hmm…. It almost makes you think that some religions operate differently than others.

The statute’s opponents, including President Obama, agree not to support racial profiling in college admissions, public employment, the awarding of government contracts, or in their descriptions of tea partiers, critics of Obamacare, talk-radio hosts, and Cambridge cops. In return, supporters of the Arizona law agree to insert a provision explicitly prohibiting racial profiling.

You can have libertarian Republicans – and, as libertarians are no doubt eager to point out, you can certainly have hypocritical ‘libertarian’ Republicans – but the Democrats are a liberal-run political party these days, and liberals like to expand the state. That’s what liberals do. This can be disconcerting to counter-culture types that are not on the Left’s list of protected lifestyle choices.

Thirteen years ago, the Border Patrol began to build a wall extending 14 miles along the Mexican border south of San Diego. Part of it was made of old landing mats from Vietnam; other parts were erected from steel mesh. Before the wall, it was estimated that over 500,000 illegal immigrants streamed across that stretch of California each year. By 2005, the New York Times reported, that number was down to 138,000. The area’s crime rate also dropped significantly.

The great villain in the deregulation myth is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1999, which repealed some restrictions of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, namely those preventing bank holding companies from owning other kinds of financial firms. Critics charge that Gramm-Leach-Bliley broke down the walls between banks and other kinds of financial institutions, thereby allowing enormous systemic risk to percolate through the financial world. This critique is the keystone of the “blame deregulation” case, but it doesn’t hold up: While Gramm-Leach-Bliley did facilitate a number of mergers and the general consolidation of the financial-services industry, it did not eliminate restrictions on traditional depository banks’ securities activities. In any case, it was investment banks, such as Lehman Brothers, that were at the center of the crisis, and they would have been able to make the same bad investments if Gramm-Leach-Bliley had never been passed.

Here is what really happened: there was a bubble in housing prices. The bubble was mostly the result of government policy–loose money, combined with pressure on banks to make bad loans to unqualified home buyers. It all worked for a while because Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, under the leadership of Congressman Barney Frank and others, created a secondary market for shaky mortgages. Goldman Sachs participated in this market, downstream, along with many other players. But the whole thing wasn’t an accident or a conspiracy, it was government policy. The home price bubble could have only one possible result. All bubbles burst–there is nothing else they can do–and the bursting of a bubble is always painful. The whole disaster that began in 2008 was the inevitable result of government policy, which is why Senators are so anxious to pass the buck to Goldman Sachs.

I’m not a particular fan of either Goldman Sachs or Congress, but today’s hearing confirms that, given a choice, I’d rather have Goldman Sachs regulating Congress than Congress regulating Goldman Sachs. Goldman’s employees are much smarter, considerably more honest, and far more likely to have my interests at heart.